For young researchers with an interest in transnational history, here is a recent call to attend the workshop from GCSC and Herder Institut titled “Heritage Studies and Socialism: Transnational Perspectives on Heritage in Eastern and Central Europe” -taking place in Giessen, Germany on 23-25 November 2016. The call explains:

In the last decade, heritage studies have emerged as a field of cross-disciplinary research covering the topics including the built environment, museums and collections, urban planning, memory, and tourism. This workshop brings together both early career researchers and established researchers for a discussion about the concept of heritage in relation to the Eastern and Central European region. In light of the different traditions in heritage policies and property rights, what notion of heritage do we employ for the study of heritage in socialist and post-socialist societies? Using this question as a point of departure, the presentations seek to critically engage with the field of heritage studies and reflect on core concepts such as authenticity and originality. We discuss the advantages and limitations of these approaches when applied to the (post-) socialist context, while also bringing together alternative approaches from the examples presented during the workshop.…

For those hitting the job market this year with an eye on the Pacific Northwest, here’s a recent call for applications to a tenure-track position as an Assistant Professor at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, the state capitol and not far from the Cascade Mountains, the Oregon Coast, or Portland. The Department of History invites…

While not a topic we’ve featured enough here at the Toynbee Prize Foundation, military history is alive and well and a necessary part of the conversation on global history. Luckily for its practitioners, too, there’s a recent call for applications for a great job at the University of Texas-Austin, whose Department of History is in the process…

For graduate students interested in transnational approaches and based in the Midwest, here is a recent call for papers for a graduate student conference at Central Michigan University. This is a great opportunity to present one’s work early on during graduate education. The International Graduate Historical Studies Conference will host “Crossing Borders, Challenging Boundaries, ”…

Here’s an recent call for papers for a wokshop on transnational history taking place at Princeton University (US), on February 10-11, 2017 entitled “Transnational relations between Eastern Europe/Russia-USSR and the Middle East, late 19th century to 1991.” The program has been organized by the Université de Genève and Princeton University partnership grant co-directed by Sandrine Kott (University of Geneva) and Cyrus Schayegh…

For readers looking for the next outlet to place their article or review in, here’s a recent announcement of a new journal for transnational history led by Thomas Adam (University of Texas Arlington) that is worth paying attention to: The Yearbook of Transnational History is inviting scholars to submit articles for its inaugural volume to be published…

With the academic year now over for many of our readers, we move quickly into … the season of more job postings. Here’s one of the first for this season–with an early application deadline–that should surely interest readers of the Global History Blog. “The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies,” announces a recent posting…

But don’t take it from us. The Economist Intelligence Unit has ranked Pittsburgh as the most livable city in the United States. Zagat calls it the #1 food city in the United States. Money magazine names it one of the best places to live in the Northeast United States. Travel and Leisure magazine calls it one of the places to visit in the United States. The former steel city located at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers in western Pennsylvania appeals, it seems, to a wide variety of audiences. The Huffington Post calls it one of several cities that aspiring techies should consider moving to. And startup founders who leave Silicon Valley or New York’s “Silicon Alley” for the more affordable setting of Pittsburgh, and its top research universities, might find themselves moving in next to retirees, as well, as Kiplinger magazine has selected it as a top location to retire. (These, and more of the myriad accolades Pittsburgh has garnered, are exhaustively catalogued by VisitPITTSBURGH, the tourism agency of Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located).

Pittsburgh, in short, seems like an island of prosperity and success in North America’s Rust Belt, a region more commonly associated with economic involution, plant shutdowns, and “ruin porn” than food trucks and hipsters. How did it avert the fate of post-industrial economic decline that blighted many a Youngstown, Ohio, Gary, Indiana, or Elkhart, Indiana? Yet perhaps the better question to ask might be why Pittsburgh embraced a post-industrial future as avidly as it did. After all, many other cities in the Rust Belt, particularly those in neighboring Canada, retained their steel factories far longer than did Pittsburgh, all the while managing a transition to white-collar employment far more successfully than did their southern cousins of Youngstown, Gary, or Elkhart. When one casts their field of vision across the horizons of Lake Erie or Lake Huron to the smokestacks and chimneys of Canada, the trajectory and choices involved in the transition of the Rust Belt from the 1940s to today looks quite different. Such a narrative frame casts into question the narrative of inevitable de-industrialization, and makes clear how post-industrialism was as much as policy choice as it was a historical inevitability.

“Remaking the Rustbelt: The Postindustrial Transformation of North America,” the recent book of Professor Tracy Neumann (Wayne State University)

Such is the intervention of Tracy Neumann, an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Wayne State University in Detroit, in her recent book Remaking the Rustbelt: The Postindustrial Transformation of North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). In the book, Neumann compares and contrasts the trajectory of two North American steel towns, Pittsburgh and Hamilton, Ontario, showing how de-industrialization was as much the result of a set of policy choices embraced by civic elites as it was a historical inevitability. Even before the decade of the 1970s most commonly associated with de-industrialization, policy elites in both Pittsburgh and Hamilton drew on a limited set of post-industrial urban visions as they sought to plot out what a city built more on services, rather than manufacturing—on briefcases than lunch pails—would look like.

Drawing on a number of city, provincial and state, and national archives in the United States and Canada, Neumann shows how in spite of a shared vision of post-industrial flourishing, the very different institutional settings in which Hamilton’s and Pittsburgh’s civic elites operated created a very different set of policy outcomes. Unfettered by federal or state restrictions, Pittsburgh’s corporate leaders and Democratic mayors were able to rapidly transform their city into what they envisioned would be a Mecca for white-collar workers—causing, in the process, immense pain and dislocation for the city’s actual, rather than desired, residents. In Canada, meanwhile, civic leaders in Hamilton aspired to a similarly service industry-oriented future for their city, but remained captive to provincial policies that channeled post-industrial growth toward Toronto. In Neumann’s telling, the global structure of economic change matters—but so, too, do institutions and the menu of policy choices with which elected officials and corporate elites imagine themselves presented.

At a moment when many Americans and Canadians, and other denizens of a North Atlantic Rust Belt are posing the question of whether the move from pig iron to management consulting—or, for many, from stable lifetime employment to a McJob—Neumann’s book comes as a welcome entry into the conversation. More broadly, however, Remaking the Rustbelt provides an example of how Americanists are writing urban history in a transnational and global key. Readers interested in what, exactly, the relationship of post-industrialism to “neoliberalism” in the United States will find much of value in Neumann’s work, but so, too, will scholars studying how processes of global change find their way to the ground across regions through the grinders and gears of policymaking. That makes it a valuable contribution whether the pair of cities one is interested is Pittsburgh and Hamilton, El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, or Mumbai and Dubai. The Executive Director of the Toynbee Prize Foundation, Timothy Nunan (TPF), recently had the opportunity to sit down with Tracy Neumann (TN) to discuss Remaking the Rust Belt, some of the arguments of the book, and what she has in store following the June release of her first monograph.…

For those readers interested in either transnational history, the history of the Middle East and South Asia, or Islamic history, two graduate students at Columbia University and Rice University, Roy Bar-Sadeh and Esmat Elhalaby, have organized what looks to be a terrific workshop taking place at the former institution this October. According to a recent…

For those readers already looking ahead to their summer plans, here’s one more workshop to consider. At the Free University of Berlin, the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies is hosting a conference called “Becoming Trans-German: Transnational, Transdisciplinary, Transgender, Transhuman” from June 23-25, 2016. In spite of the name, the conference is directed…